Love Note

I don’t remember whose idea it was, Suzanne’s, Fiona’s, or mine. The three of us did everything together that year. We were in Form 2, the British equivalent of 8th grade. My family had moved to Dunedin, New Zealand in the middle of a US school year when I was in 7th grade. I’d had two summers that year, one in the States and one in New Zealand. I had always been a year younger than everyone in my class because my birthday fell at the end of the traditional cut-off date. Now I was the same age because of the reversal in seasons.

The school was an old-fashioned one but coed. Each school in Dunedin had a uniform unique to the school. At ours, the girls' uniform was a navy wool pinafore dress with wide pleats and a white blouse. The sweater (jumper in British parlance) was a grey pullover with one dark red and one yellow stripe around the V-neck. We wore grey knee socks and brown lace-up Oxford shoes. The boys wore grey wool short pants all year with button-up cotton shirts and kept their socks slouched down. Pull them up at your peril. You were bound to be ostracized and receive a substantial avalanche of name-calling.

Every day we would start with an assembly of the entire school. Together we would sing the first two verses of the about to be adopted New Zealand national anthem:

"God of Nations at Thy feet, /In the bonds of love we meet, /Hear our voices, we entreat, /God defend our free land.

Guard Pacific’s triple star/From the shafts of strife and war, /Make her praises heard afar, /God defend New Zealand.

Men of every creed and race, /Gather here before Thy face, /Asking Thee to bless this place,/God defend our free land.

From dissension, envy, hate, /And corruption guard our state, /Make our country good and great, /God defend New Zealand."

The anthem is still one of my favorites. At the time, the Maori language version entitled "Aotearoa" (Land of the Flying Clouds) was not yet commonly sung. The original anthem of New Zealand, "God Save the Queen", was also, and still is, sung to the tune the United States later adopted for "My Country, 'Tis of Thee". After the anthem, we would go on and sing, led by the music teacher Mrs. Lamb. To this day I have no idea what guided her selections. Bob Seeger's “Turn the Page”; Rod Stewart's “We Are Sailing"; “Morning has Broken” by Cat Stevens; and most bewildering of all, “Bohemian Rapsody” by Queen. I can still sing all of the lyrics to “Bohemian Rapsody” and have used it to gain the respect of pretty much every teenage boy I have ever met.

Classwork was easy that year as I had been ahead as a 7th grader. Our class stayed together for every subject. The only things new to me were home economics, in which we learned how to make scones, preserve jam and bake cookies; and sewing class in which my final project was a pair of green cotton velvet jeans.

Lunch was held outside. We sat on long wooden benches set around a courtyard, and kids either brought lunch or ordered from the canteen in the morning from a shortlist of fish and chips, sausage and chips, meat pies, or sausage rolls. The first two offerings came wrapped in a clean sheet of newsprint surrounded by about an inch of the previous day’s newspaper. Of course, since it was middle school no one ever ordered the sausage.

Recess was free time. Suzanne, Fiona, and I usually spent the entire time one-handedly leaping the chain-link fence that separated our school from the adjoining school. The height was somewhere between my chest and my waist, perhaps 42 inches or so. Suzanne was considerably shorter than me. Vaulting the fence was an achievement. Fiona was taller. If we weren’t fence leaping, we were playing tag with the boys we had crushes on or surreptitiously watching one of our more forward classmates kiss her boyfriend.

One day the three of us stayed after school to help the teacher with a project. We had completed our task and were sitting idly, chatting about the boys we liked. The teacher was out of the room. It was a Friday. Perhaps she had gone home or was in a meeting.

Fiona was dreamily wishing she had enough courage to tell her crush that she liked him; and one of us, I won’t swear it was me, but it has never been a good idea to leave me with nothing to do, came up with the idea of writing a love note and leaving it in his desk for him to find the following Monday. Fiona was apprehensive but agreed. Being shy and afraid of rejection, she didn’t want to sign her name.

It was then that the plan reached full development. We would write a love note for each person in the class and pair them up with someone we thought would best suit. We spent the rest of the afternoon writing and placed each love note inside the appropriate desk. Satisfied, we shut off the lights, closed the door, and went off for the weekend.

Over the weekend, I came down with the flu and was out of school for an entire week, so the rest of the story was hearsay for me.

On Monday morning, everyone had reached the classroom after the usual rousing assembly and opened their desks. There was a bit of extra confusion. A boy raised his hand and held it up until the teacher asked what was wrong. It was a love note. He read it out loud. Everyone giggled. Another boy raised his hand. The teacher looked around the room.

“Has anyone else received one of these?”, she asked.

Slowly every hand went up. Except Suzanne and Fiona’s. Somehow being ratted out had not figured into our scheme.

The punishment? Cleaning all the desks and writing, “I will not write notes.”, one hundred and fifty times each on the blackboard.

The following week, recovered from the flu, I met them at the bottom of the hundreds of steps they used to come flying down every morning. Luckily for me, still friends, we finished our walk to school together. I walked into the classroom timidly. Apart from a moment of silence, I never received the scolding I most likely richly deserved. I suppose the teacher had moved on and so had the kids for the most part.

Suzanne, Fiona, and I stayed fast friends for the remainder of the year and must have channeled our energies into more productive pursuits. To the best of my knowledge, Fiona never told her crush that she liked him.

The following school year, my family moved to another neighborhood. I started at a new high school without any kids from the old one. In another year and a half, my family moved back to the US. I never saw Suzanne and Fiona again, but I often think about how kind they were to include a shy, awkward, and mischievous American in their lifelong friendship with each other.

*****

Regarding the use of New Zealand's National Anthem "God Defend New Zealand": there is no copyright of the text; however, changing the words is not allowed and copyright does apply to individual recordings. https://mch.govt.nz/nz-identity-heritage/national-anthems/protocols